Visual Experience is Prima Facie Evidence

Are Claims Evidence? · Why Wouldn't Every Claim be Sufficient Evidence? · Visual Experience is Prima Facie Evidence · Relevant Expert?

Halting the video again at 35:41.

Joe Schmid takes up the possibility of hallucination.

Sure.

BUT, he also makes the point that if he doesn't know he's hallucinating, he should accept the computer screen as showing a real "lovely bald man in a red shirt" (meaning Dillahunty, who knows he's bald and knows his shirt is red and might even think he's lovely or chuckle at the joke).

A parallel.

If I know I am on a train, I should accept that things I see outside the window as moving are in fact not moving the way I see them, because the train ride making me move in relation to the observed items, makes them move, not relative to the surrounding space, but relative to me, insofar as I am considered a kind of frame of reference.

This is clearly inforced by the fact that I know from experience outside trains that churches, hills, trees and forests, cars in a parking lot don't move and walking people don't move that fast.

On the other hand, if I don't know I'm in a train ride, I have no reason to take items observed outside my immediate vicinity as still if I see them move.

Now, the Heliocentric certainly thinks he knows he's on a "train ride" around the Sun in relation to Pisces and Virgo. But a Geocentric would reply, no, it's Earth that's stationary and the Sun that's moving in relation to Pisces and Virgo. An angel moving it.

And when each day-and-night we either can observe Pisces or Virgo as not hidden in the Sun (right now that would be Pisces we can observe), the Heliocentric thinks he knows that we are on a merry-go-round ride in relation to Pisces and Virgo, taking turns in Paris and Pacific (or further North the edge of Siberia) to see Pisces, as we successively turn to and away from them. But a Geocentric will reply, no, it's the universe that's moving, with Pisces and Virgo and right now the Sun taken along with and below Virgo and hiding her. And God omnipotent moving the Universe each day.

I will believe the Heliocentric on his testimony on what he thinks he knows. He's honest. But even if he's an astronomer, his testimony isn't sufficient evidence for him knowing this to be a fact. I have met at least two astronomers* online giving evidence that Geocentrism, the default position given what we see, or its corollary, supernatural movers, God and angels, are not something they keep in consideration even as a possibility.

If they don't consider it a possibility, how could I conclude they had refuted it? Refutation involving normally considering what you refute.

As long as I don't know I'm the one moving, I have no reason to take Sun and Virgo and Pisces as being still (compared to the Earth and ignoring Sun's supposed "trajectory around the centre of our galaxy") or Earth as moving with me. I have no comparable back-ground knowledge about stars compared to what I have about houses or trees.**

The example of the space travel, it actually is a good point against Heliocentrism, rather than against Christianity, since observing the Solar System from the outside would actually be visual proof of what was moving around what inside it. But we do not have this outside observation.

Hans Georg Lundahl
ut supra

PS, on the subsequent question of how we know scientific data, Dillahunty says, only what the scientist observed is evidence, Schmid says, correctly, to everyone except the scientist, his testimony is what we know about what he observed.

I obviously do accept what scientists clearly testify to having observed, if it's sufficiently intelligible to me. I only disagree with them on either interpretation (of current 25 pmC in a sample from Göbekli Tepe or on 0.76 arc seconds parallax in α Centauri) or whether the thing could, at all, be simply a question of observation (some people are trained to see when people are incoherent, and their training may be such as to make them overdo that interpretation ... a misunderstanding rewarded by more patients in an order of magnitude and therefore more work opportunities). A shrink misunderstanding someone's coherence, a carbon dater not taking into account that samples from Göbekli Tepe are from when the atmosphere had just half the carbon 14 content compared to now, an astronomer who thinks we moved 0.76 arc seconds with the angle between our positions measured in α Centauri, none of these are simply the facts they observed./HGL

* Phil Plaite and one from Denmark. My bad, Erik Høg was the guy who couldn't help me about inverted parallax in 2015, c. 11 years ago. But on the other hand, searching him I found two more like Phil Plaite.

** I'm aware I haven't here detailed the technical answers on all items for Geocentrism, but that is outside the boundary of epistemological probability we are dealing with here.